Bridegroom Price in Urban India: Class, Caste and 'Dowry Evil' Among Christians in Madras

Abstract

The classical notion of dowry as stridhanam-a daughter's wedding settlement-is no longer an adequate descriptive model of marriage payments in contemporary urban India. Nowadays the term refers also, indeed more so, to a typically large cash transfer by the bride's household to that of her prospective spouse. Though widely condemned as 'dowry evil', this practice is spreading, especially among the urban well-to-do. The payment of 'bridegroom price' violates the traditional notion of dowry in two senses. First, it cannot have the connotation of a daughter's portion, since it is alienated from her. Second, the bridegroom's parents, to whom it passes, utilise it to acquire husbands for their own daughters. Bridegroom price thereby enters a 'societal fund', moving among domestic units within a marriage circle in a manner not unlike property in bridewealth systems. Among Christians, only families following caste-specific unions pay bridegroom price; those who marry without regard to caste do not alienate resources in this way, though they settle stridhanam on daughters. Bridegroom price prestations are therefore to be seen not merely as a way of defending and enhancing a favourable class position, but as a means of preserving and redefining endogamous boundaries in a heterogeneous urban setting. The idea that a woman should receive a marriage settlement from her family is long-established in India. Classical Hindu texts have identified such property as stridhanam, and it may be regarded, according to Khare, as 'part of the sacred cultural concept of kanyadan' (lit. 'gift of a maiden' in marriage) (I970: I04). Endowments of this kind are referred to by numerous writers as 'dowry', and distinguished from other forms of property which women may acquire in the course of their lifetime, e.g. through their own labour. Tambiah argues that 'dowry connotes female property or female rights to property which is transferred at a woman's marriage as a sort of pre-mortem inheritance' (I973: 64). The notion of dowry as a pre-mortem inheritance (which is also propounded by Goody (1973: i)) is challenged by Madan, who prefers to regard it instead as a 'substitute for women's lack of rights of inheritance equivalent to those of men' (I975: 237). A third view is that it might be more appropriately seen as 'a moral claim . . . in lieu of the rights of maintenance she renounces at marriage' (Parry I979: 239). Evidence suggests that the custom of giving dowry has traditionally been more prevalent in north than in south India, and in the latter region, more commonly found among Brahmans than others (see Miller I980). There is, nevertheless, a wide measure of agreement among scholars in seeing the dowry as an important element in the establishment of marital ties between the bride's natal family and that of her bridegroom.